Overlapping taxonomies and the audience property

ActivityPub Threadiverse Working Group
8

So here’s some interesting things i found…

what is an “audience” generally

wrt “primary and secondary audience” as established by to/cc/bto/bcc:

elf-pavlik: what we consider an audience? other people, groups, circles, lists of contacts …

jasnell: Any of these. This is intentionally left open.

audience used to be scope

The scope indicates that the audience for the note is only members of the Organization.
The to indicates specific people who should be actively notified.
The context indicates a larger context within which the note exists.

so at the very least we can surmise the following points:

  • “to” should actively notify specific actors
    • implying that “cc” should passively notify specific actors? or not notify them, just deliver to them?
  • “context” is as we already understand it, a purposeful grouping within which the object exists
  • “scope” (later “audience”) is some kind of indication of something

To be clear: scope is not access control… it is closely related to to/bto/cc/bcc in that a consuming implementation can use it to determine who it ought to display the content to. So, for instance, given the note example above, a consuming implementation may include the note on the activity timeline of anyone associated with the ‘My Employer’ organization, but it would only activity notify two individuals listed by the to property. The context property, on the other hand, has absolutely nothing to do with audience targeting. The above note is essentially saying, “This is a note that was created in relation to A Project. Make the note available to anyone in the My Employer organization but specifically notify John and Sally”

scope is advisory as to the publishers intent of whose attention they want to draw to the object. A consuming application may use the scope/to/bto/cc/bcc to determine it’s access control policy if it wishes, but is not required to do so.

In the example, a consuming provider could still choose to allow anyone to see the note, but only actively include the note on the activity streams of people in the company.

scope could be renamed to audience

In the AS2 vocabulary, there is a scope property that is used generally
to identify the audience. The targeting properties to, bto, cc and
bcc indicate the audience subsets within that identified scope. The
context is really intended to allow objects and activities to be
logically grouped. For instance, in an enterprise setting, the context may
group activities by project while the scope would identify one or more
teams for which the activity is considered relevant, while the to/cc fields
are used to indicate specific individuals to notify.

gonna emphasize this bit here:

The targeting properties to, bto, cc and
bcc indicate the audience subsets

and also

advisory as to the publishers intent of whose attention they want to draw to the object

a consuming implementation may include the note on the activity timeline of anyone associated with the ‘My Employer’ organization, but it would only activity notify two individuals listed by the to property.

only actively include the note on the activity streams of people in the company.

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